: In this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (19... more : In this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993) as a departure for examining how and where academic activism can take place. This is situated both within and apart from existing public struggles, including #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) and other current movements. Academic activism will be explored as an intellectual project that may at times problematise notions of the public, the intellectual, and the activist.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2015
This is a report on the 'Workshop on Creative Methods: Gender, Sex and Relating' conferen... more This is a report on the 'Workshop on Creative Methods: Gender, Sex and Relating' conference, 15 October 2014
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Clare Birchall discusses the “sharing economy”, “shareveillance” and the depoliticised subjectivity shaped by both open and opaque data. In order to re-imagine subjectivity in the face of shareveillance, Birchall calls on Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity”. Ultimately, she explains how the concept of “sharing” can be politicised as a Commons, while the appropriation of opacity can become a political act. Her reassessment of the politics and values associated with openness and secrecy has implications for media scholars, particularly in terms of the need to think more critically about what kinds of publishing, networks and communications we want to develop.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this visual essay, the organising committee look back on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 and re... more In this visual essay, the organising committee look back on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 and reflect on the overarching theme, the organisation and the running of the conference. The conference’s theme, ‘Transformative Practice and Theory: Where We Stand Today’, forms the basis of this special issue of Networking Knowledge, with developed papers from the conference, as well as interviews with some of the keynote speakers, included in this issue.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Rebecca Coleman discusses the affective relations between bodies, images and environments. Coleman offers an overview of her work on images and the body, as well as her interest in theorising the present and the future, and explains her engagement with feminism, new materialism and Deleuze, in particular. To understand how bodies ‘become’, she argues for the need to understand both process, transformation and change, and what stays, sticks or gets stopped.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Lisa Blackman discusses her work on affect and the body, as well as her new book Haunted Data, which explores the creative and critical challenges of computational cultures for theories of affect and mediation, and the potential of PPPR (post-publication peer-review) to provide a corpus of data that be re-moved (Rheinberger) and performed for its hauntological potential. Working with the concept of ‘haunted data’ to follow those traces, deferrals, absences, gaps and their movements within a particular corpus of data, and to re-move and keep alive what becomes submerged or hidden by particular regimes of visibility and remembering, Blackman illustrates how these movements are simultaneously technical, affective, historical, social, political and ethical.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to his keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to his keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Gary Hall discusses the processes of neoliberal subjectivation and the metricisation of the academy. Arguing that most media, communication and cultural studies critique tends to focus on the new, self-governing and self-exploitative subjects academics and students are transforming into rather than the scholarly subjectivities they are changing from, Hall maintains that both the new neoliberal model (associated with corporate social and mobile media) and the liberal humanist model (associated with conventional print-on-paper publishing) are involved in the subordination of scholarly agency and consciousness to the pre-programmed, controllable patterns of the capitalist culture industries. Taking in some of the open access initiatives with which he’s involved, the interview addresses both Hall’s account of the processes of neoliberalisation and his experiments with radically different wa...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2017
In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avat... more In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avatar and player. We draw on a particular line of posthumanist theory associated closely with the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles that suggests a constantly permeable, fluid and extended subjectivity, displacing the boundaries between human and other. In doing so, we propose a posthuman concept of empathy in gameplay, and we apply this concept to data from the first author’s 18-month ethnographic field notes of gameplay in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Exploring these data through our analysis of posthuman empathy, we demonstrate the entanglement of avatar–player, machine–human relationship. We show how empathy allows us to understand this relationship as constantly negotiated and in process, producing visceral reactions in the intra-connected avatar–player subject as well as moments of co-produced in-game action that require ‘affective matching’ between subjecti...
Avatars and gamers create channels of affective flow through their connection to a gameworld. Els... more Avatars and gamers create channels of affective flow through their connection to a gameworld. Elsewhere (Wilde and Evans) I have explored this flow as an empathic exchange, wherein the desires of each must be aligned with the other in order to progress in-game. More than this, avatars themselves incite a range of affective and emotional responses. Drawing on my autoethnographic immersion in the game World of Warcraft, in the following article I consider feelings I have towards my avatar, ranging from affection to annoyance. Exploring her affective potential, I ask what these feelings can tell us about our relationships with technology and conclude that the way we are able to affect and be affected by others and environments around us shows us to be the entangled beings posthumanism suggests, and the avatar-gamer is one example that demonstrates the intimacy that emerges between human and machine in contemporary societies. This paper therefore contributes to debates that renounce the...
: In this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (19... more : In this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993) as a departure for examining how and where academic activism can take place. This is situated both within and apart from existing public struggles, including #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) and other current movements. Academic activism will be explored as an intellectual project that may at times problematise notions of the public, the intellectual, and the activist.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2015
This is a report on the 'Workshop on Creative Methods: Gender, Sex and Relating' conferen... more This is a report on the 'Workshop on Creative Methods: Gender, Sex and Relating' conference, 15 October 2014
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Clare Birchall discusses the “sharing economy”, “shareveillance” and the depoliticised subjectivity shaped by both open and opaque data. In order to re-imagine subjectivity in the face of shareveillance, Birchall calls on Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity”. Ultimately, she explains how the concept of “sharing” can be politicised as a Commons, while the appropriation of opacity can become a political act. Her reassessment of the politics and values associated with openness and secrecy has implications for media scholars, particularly in terms of the need to think more critically about what kinds of publishing, networks and communications we want to develop.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this visual essay, the organising committee look back on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 and re... more In this visual essay, the organising committee look back on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 and reflect on the overarching theme, the organisation and the running of the conference. The conference’s theme, ‘Transformative Practice and Theory: Where We Stand Today’, forms the basis of this special issue of Networking Knowledge, with developed papers from the conference, as well as interviews with some of the keynote speakers, included in this issue.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Rebecca Coleman discusses the affective relations between bodies, images and environments. Coleman offers an overview of her work on images and the body, as well as her interest in theorising the present and the future, and explains her engagement with feminism, new materialism and Deleuze, in particular. To understand how bodies ‘become’, she argues for the need to understand both process, transformation and change, and what stays, sticks or gets stopped.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Lisa Blackman discusses her work on affect and the body, as well as her new book Haunted Data, which explores the creative and critical challenges of computational cultures for theories of affect and mediation, and the potential of PPPR (post-publication peer-review) to provide a corpus of data that be re-moved (Rheinberger) and performed for its hauntological potential. Working with the concept of ‘haunted data’ to follow those traces, deferrals, absences, gaps and their movements within a particular corpus of data, and to re-move and keep alive what becomes submerged or hidden by particular regimes of visibility and remembering, Blackman illustrates how these movements are simultaneously technical, affective, historical, social, political and ethical.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2016
In this follow-up interview to his keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to his keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Gary Hall discusses the processes of neoliberal subjectivation and the metricisation of the academy. Arguing that most media, communication and cultural studies critique tends to focus on the new, self-governing and self-exploitative subjects academics and students are transforming into rather than the scholarly subjectivities they are changing from, Hall maintains that both the new neoliberal model (associated with corporate social and mobile media) and the liberal humanist model (associated with conventional print-on-paper publishing) are involved in the subordination of scholarly agency and consciousness to the pre-programmed, controllable patterns of the capitalist culture industries. Taking in some of the open access initiatives with which he’s involved, the interview addresses both Hall’s account of the processes of neoliberalisation and his experiments with radically different wa...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2017
In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avat... more In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avatar and player. We draw on a particular line of posthumanist theory associated closely with the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles that suggests a constantly permeable, fluid and extended subjectivity, displacing the boundaries between human and other. In doing so, we propose a posthuman concept of empathy in gameplay, and we apply this concept to data from the first author’s 18-month ethnographic field notes of gameplay in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Exploring these data through our analysis of posthuman empathy, we demonstrate the entanglement of avatar–player, machine–human relationship. We show how empathy allows us to understand this relationship as constantly negotiated and in process, producing visceral reactions in the intra-connected avatar–player subject as well as moments of co-produced in-game action that require ‘affective matching’ between subjecti...
Avatars and gamers create channels of affective flow through their connection to a gameworld. Els... more Avatars and gamers create channels of affective flow through their connection to a gameworld. Elsewhere (Wilde and Evans) I have explored this flow as an empathic exchange, wherein the desires of each must be aligned with the other in order to progress in-game. More than this, avatars themselves incite a range of affective and emotional responses. Drawing on my autoethnographic immersion in the game World of Warcraft, in the following article I consider feelings I have towards my avatar, ranging from affection to annoyance. Exploring her affective potential, I ask what these feelings can tell us about our relationships with technology and conclude that the way we are able to affect and be affected by others and environments around us shows us to be the entangled beings posthumanism suggests, and the avatar-gamer is one example that demonstrates the intimacy that emerges between human and machine in contemporary societies. This paper therefore contributes to debates that renounce the...
Uploads
Papers by Poppy Wilde